The Choice is Yours

Forget Highways or Dieways. The choice here is Livers or Gizzards. We're in the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood of North Charleston, SC, where choices are few and far between. This is the epicenter of the city's criminal culture and the habitat of its prey. It is a solid barrier to the regentrification which the city seeks.

The only source of cooked food in the immediate area comes from this place the name of which is uncertain. Such places tend to take on a decidedly generic image. Perhaps ownership shifts too frequently for any one name to long remain on the door. We just call it the Liver or Gizzards place.

It is unlikely that any four star restaurants are going to take the first step into this new market. Setting up shop here on Spruill Avenue is an adventure more of the quick and the dead rather than of profit and loss. The convenience store across the street has bars at every window and door. A half block south of here the soft drink vending machine lives in its own cage. Even the American Legion post is encamped behind a ten foot high chain link fence dressed in barbed wire. We are amazed that the traffic light has not been carried off in the night.

Note that the choice between liver or gizzards is made at separate windows where the goods are passed through protective bars behind which plywood baffles close between orders. We don't expect any of the downtown food service entrepreneurs to try to move in on this operation.